IAEA Iran Report: Why Is Iran Blocking Inspections?

The United Nations nuclear watchdog told its member states on Friday 13 November that it cannot say where one of Iran’s declared uranium enrichment plants is. “The Agency does not know IFEP’s exact location, status for safeguards purposes or whether it contains nuclear material,” the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a confidential quarterly report circulated in Vienna. IFEP is the Isfahan Fuel Enrichment Plant, which Iran declared to the agency in June 2025 and which no inspector has entered.

So why is Iran blocking inspections? The IAEA Iran report quotes Tehran’s own answer. Iran told the agency this month that talks on bringing inspectors back cannot go ahead amid “persistent, explicit, and public threats by the President of the United States of America” to attack it again. The day before the report came out, Donald Trump said of Iran: “In one day their bridges are gone.”

The IAEA said it is “increasingly concerned” about the Isfahan plant. Its director general, Rafael Grossi, wrote that the agency is “not able to conclude that there has been no diversion of declared nuclear material” in Iran.

• The IAEA said on 13 November that its lack of information about Iran’s nuclear material is a “proliferation concern” that “needs to be rectified with the utmost urgency.”
• Iran told the agency that inspections will not be settled “until the root causes of the present situation are addressed,” and cited Trump’s public threats of new strikes.
• Grossi asked Iran to consider “technical and gradual measures” that would let inspectors return. The agency said it is “fully prepared to resume its safeguards activities in Iran at short notice.”
• Inspectors have visited one Iranian site since June 2025: the Bushehr power reactor, from 12 to 15 September 2026.

The 13-page report said Iran has not let inspectors into any of the sites bombed by Israel and the United States in June 2025, and has not reported what happened to the uranium stored there.

Grossi wrote that it is “more than a year since the agency lost continuity of knowledge” of Iran’s declared stock of highly enriched uranium. The last verified figure dates from 13 June 2025: 440.9 kilograms enriched up to 60 percent, a short step from weapons grade. The agency says material of that kind should be checked every month. We reported the numbers in how much enriched uranium Iran has and where it is.

On Isfahan, the agency said it is “increasingly concerned” that Iran has allowed neither a visit to the plant nor a look at its design. The report did not say that enrichment is taking place there.

The agency called it “critical” to carry out verification in Iran “without further delay.” It asked Tehran to report the state of its enrichment plants and of the stockpile, and to let inspectors back into the bombed sites.

Tehran told the agency this month that the discussion cannot proceed under “persistent, explicit, and public threats by the President of the United States of America,” including threats against its nuclear facilities. It said the matter will not be resolved “until the root causes of the present situation are addressed and the essential requirements for normal safeguards implementation are restored.”

In the same message Iran reaffirmed what it called its “firm commitment to resume full implementation of its safeguards obligations,” and gave no date.

Reza Najafi, Iran’s ambassador to the agency, said the same in a 10-page letter that reached diplomats in Vienna in the first week of November. He wrote that attacks on monitored facilities, and continued threats against them, had created exceptional circumstances in which routine inspections are impossible. Iran would consider wider cooperation, he added, once inspections can be carried out safely.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters in Tehran on 9 November, in translated remarks: “Iran has not ceased fulfilling its obligations under the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency.” He said the attacks had “created challenges” and that “neither the IAEA Director General nor the Board of Governors has fulfilled their duties” by failing to condemn them.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote to Grossi, the UN secretary-general and the president of the Security Council in letters dated 10 November. His subject was a US State Department offer, announced days earlier, of up to $20 million for information on Iran’s nuclear programme, its scientists and its facilities. “The Islamic Republic of Iran condemns in the strongest terms this reckless announcement,” Araghchi wrote. To Grossi he added: “It is essential that the Agency’s safeguards system not be instrumentalized or compromised.”

Iran also told the agency that inspection data must not be “disclosed, misused or exploited.” The agency replied in writing that it protects all confidential information, the report said.

The Board of Governors normally meets in Vienna in November, and quarterly reports of this kind are written for it. Watch whether the Western states table a new resolution and how Russia and China vote. Griffith said on 10 September what Washington wants: to “hold Iran to account.”

Watch for a second inspection. The agency said Bushehr runs on Russian fuel enriched to 4.5 percent, which tells it nothing about Isfahan, Natanz or Fordow. A visit to any of those three would be the first of the “gradual measures” Grossi asked for.

Watch Tehran’s parliament and the Supreme National Security Council after the Assembly’s statement. Iran’s safeguards agreement lasts only as long as its treaty membership.

Our reading: the agency says it has lost sight of the material, and Iran has tied the inspectors’ return to a president who says he needs no deal. Until one of the two moves, the 440.9 kilograms stay unverified.

Nobody outside Iran’s government has said where the Isfahan plant is, whether centrifuges are installed there or whether it holds uranium. The agency has not said enrichment is under way. Iran has not said how much of its 60 percent stock survived two rounds of bombing.